1. Field of the Invention
This present invention pertains to computerized method and software system for automating manual processes for handling very large programs (comprising of a nested hierarchy of projects) to small projects to, including tracking and reporting of all pertinent governance-related activities, documents, assets and resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
The economic growth in the last decade combined with globalization has resulted in a huge increase in large and colossal initiatives and their activities are spread across borders and continents. Mega programs can include many programs which in turn include several projects have become a necessary form of accomplishing small, medium and large implementations to enable different groups, possibly geographically dispersed, to perform work discretely while having functional managers, program and project managers tie the inter-connectivity relationships between different projects, programs and mega programs throughout the delivery lifecycle. These implementations can be related to industry specialization such as Information Technology Systems (IT), Software and hardware developments, outsourcing management, building and constructions, shipyard building, education and health systems, oil, gas and chemical processes and many other industry segments that require management of methodology and processes.
Effectively handling the scope, effort, budget, asset and people resource scheduling, risks, collaboration, day-to-day-activities, status and progress activities across every level of individuals that include technical, functional administration, management and executives is challenging in many aspects.
Effectively handling the management of multi-tiered mega programs, programs and projects that large corporations require to manage their subsidiaries, departments, divisions, teams and initiatives is challenging in many aspects. Various patents and patent applications propose point solutions for managing risk through defined user criteria, creating requirements, generating staffing forecast reports either through a one-off approach, or by generating forecasting reports. U.S. Pat. No. 8,065,177 issued to Puccio et al. and incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes, is directed producing a risk score corresponding to an expected risk associated with the project. Quoting its abstract “A request for completing a project is received, including first information regarding the project. At least one person for completing the project is determined based on the first information. Second information regarding the project is also received, and instructions for completing the project are identified based on analysis of the second information. The instructions include a plurality of actions to be performed by the at least one person, including the creation of at least one document using a standardized template. The performance of the actions by the at least one person in completing the project is automatically tracked”.
The current project structure further lack cohesiveness and seamless operations of supporting functions such as approvals, meeting decision tracking, independently defined and stored business considerations that can be dynamically associated to their localized activities, action items and attachments with workflows that can be associated with each source of activity, and conditions and threshold capability to trigger other actions. To harness these capabilities, companies purchase separate disparate tool sets to perform these actions, and manage them outside of their existing applications, or integrate them through custom development that then result in a creation of a mesh of disparate applications made to work together through interfaces and other means. U.S. Pat. No. 8,073,799 issued to Baldwin et al. is directed to generating requirements from end-users. Quoting an abstract, the Baldwin patent describes “a framework is created for decomposing and categorizing organizational information into data elements that are stored in a data repository. A relationship is defined between elements [and . . . ] requirements for the project are determined from the end-user [and . . . ] a standards requirement document is generated and periodically updated using the mapped data elements from the data repository”.
Exiting patents and solutions are geared towards point solutions or a very finite activity. Some vendors or patents provide a point solution for managing assets that are typically non-people related items. Others provide a contained solution for people capacity, while yet others provide a solution for scheduling, a finite solution for reporting and so on. They lack the flexibility of tracking a both non-human and human activities within the same method (or solution), and are further limited in the depth of how the capacity is managed thus limiting the automation of interactive collaboration between people, system and processes. Further, the capacity model may lack capability to define maximum limit per each time unit (i.e., each day, week, month, quarter, year), compute and display the utilized capacity, the remaining capacity, etc., the ability to select any one of many performing teams or system's calendar, schedule the required time-unit against the available time-unit against the available capacity of the resource, team or system, invoke a workflow to manage request-approve-decline actions collaboratively, assign resources to the activities that need to be performed, the ability to monitor the workflow progress, warning flags etc. and the ability to set conditions and thresholds that can trigger other actions. The lack of this end-to-end asset storing, scheduling and progress tracking and reporting inhibits the resources required to be assigned to the requested activity automatically, and further precludes the resource manager and resource-owning system the view of realizing the spread of its resources across all the activities and by what capacity, while conversely, precludes the activity owner the view of which all resources are assigned to a one activity within what capacity. Further, the commercial tools are specifically designed to manage y people, or physical entity, but not both. U.S. Pat. No. 7,962,358 issued to Fernandez et al. is directed to generating reports for resource forecasts. Quoting its abstract, the Fernandez patent describes a “system for project forecast and resource forecast management [and . . . ] the input component receives resource inputs related to actual resources [and] generates a resource forecast of actual resources and placeholder resources, and generates a project forecast of approved projects and proposed projects [and] includes a reporting component that generates a report on the resource forecast and the project forecast for the display in the display component of the GUI; the reporting component generating the report for at least one of a resource level, a role, and a project level”.
Although various segments of project management have been addressed in the patent literature, problems remain in handling cohesively a structure above project level hierarchy, typically a nested structure of mega large programs that contain large programs, programs that contain many projects etc. in the hierarchy, which can manage with ease and flexibility both the deliverable initiatives as well as top-down organization management of its subsidiaries, divisions, departments and teams. Microsoft Project and Oracle's Primavera are two such widely used examples which manage activities from project level and below, what are commonly known as activities or tasks within a project, and are designed to manage deliverable initiatives only. All aspects and complexity of the inter-dependency across mega programs, programs and projects becomes very difficult, or practically impossible to manage through a software application or method that is designed to perform tasks starting from project level hierarchy and below. Further, lack of seamless availability at every node or activity the critical supporting functions such as approvals, action items, meeting management, asset scheduling/progress tracker, capacity management etc., require significant laborious effort to track these actions through other means, and to reproduce the information speedily when required, inducing enormous effort to extract information from all these other systems and spreadsheets to create and sequence everything together, like putting all pieces back in a puzzle.